Who Follow Death
by Pyralis Anacreon
Summary: Like all reapers, Harlas doesn't remember his human life. This changes when the soul he goes to collect calls him 'Harry' and something returns to him. Eight 100 word drabbles to tell a story.


**Who Follow Death**

Like all reapers, Harlas doesn't remember his human life. This changes when the soul he goes to collect calls him 'Harry' and something returns to him.

**Somnambulence**

The others call him Harlas, and he doesn't know why, or where it came from. It has never felt like his name. But reapers don't really ask questions so Harlas doesn't ask questions, because he's just another reaper. He's just doing his job.

Reapers don't ask questions and don't feel anything, not curiosity or pity or sadness. They know that the humans, the living, feel these things, and if reapers could feel _want_, they would envy the living.

Tell me a story, the reapers would say to their newly dead charges. Tell me what it is like to be alive.

**Storytellers**

They keep stories from eons past, the reapers. They collect entire histories in their minds and when they are among their own the reapers recite them aloud, tongues curling around words of the lives they have collected and sent beyond. The reapers do not want, but...

Harlas does.

It's hard to call it want, because it is a candle next to the bonfire of the living's desires. But he knows that he has ideas, and he sits and thinks and he listens to the stories the others tell themselves.

He's pretty sure they don't know anything about living through stories.

**Higher**

So there's this legend among reapers. It's rare for a story to pass from reaper to reaper; it has to be unique. It's about a reaper falling in love with a living woman, sparing the lives of her and her husband three times over before collecting. It's about what happens to reapers who fall in love with humans, and it's about the natural order of things.

Everything rots.

And when the reaper looked into the woman's green eyes as the life-light faded, it felt everything she did. Namely, an overwhelming urge to protect the baby boy from the red-eyed halflight.

**Deadlight**

Reapers come into existence knowing everything they need to know. The life-light belongs behind the living's eyes and goes out when they're dead. Deadlights are ghosts that hang around when the soul passes through the veil. And halflights are rarest, because they're something in between everything. Not dead, not alive.

And then of course there is the veil, which Harlas sees every time he sends a soul through to the other side. Sometimes he hears voices, calling a name that sounds a lot more like his than Harlas does, but the veil falls again and they are gone.

Harlas dreams.

**Arc**

They aren't dreams in the way humans know them. Harlas dreams while awake, in stolen moments when he closes his eyes and sees doors opening and closing in his mind, revealing things buried so deep he wasn't meant to find them.

A red-haired girl lays on damp stone next to a diary. He has to save her.

A man, black hair and pale skin, falling through the veil. He cannot be saved..

An old man stumbling off a tower, two others facing him. This man did not need saving, didn't want to be saved.

_Har - _!

A door closes.

**Truth**

"Tell me a story." Harlas says to his newest charge. She is on her way peacefully enough, an old woman who died in her sleep. He likes her kind best: weary of worldly things and ready, if not eager, for whatever lies beyond the veil. They go quietly, with dignity and eyes wide open.

"Tell me your name." The old woman says with a smile that moves her entire face into deep wrinkles.

"Harlas," He replies, swallowing past the other name, that gut reaction and muscle memory of before.

He wonders what that name would have been.

**Belief**

Harlas collects young souls, too. Children who died of sickness, or accident, or murder. The stillborn and the weak ones. He smiles to the children and offers them a hand, and some come along easily enough but others wail for their parents and don't move along for a while.

The babies, the newborns, those he has to pick up himself and send along. They're always silent.

He picks up this young babe's soul, pulling it smoothly from the body, and looks up at the would-be mother for a moment.

(A door opens.)

"Harry?" The mother says.

Harry remembers everything.


End file.
